Tag Archives: Leonardo DiCaprio

Oct 18 2023
1 Comment
History, Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Scorsese’s Wild West

The acclaimed director tackles a dark chapter of American history, and makes another movie masterpiece

Killers of the Flower Moon
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro & Lily Gladstone
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 20

“If you’re gonna make trouble, make it big.”

That’s what big-deal bigshot William Hale (Robert De Niro) tells his neophyte nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio) early in director Martin Scorsese’s sprawling, slow-burn neo-Western epic about a grim and horrific chapter of American history in the expanding frontier of the 1920s.

And indeed, there’s some very big trouble in this very big big-message movie, which clocks in at nearly three and a half hours.

DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is a young WWI veteran who returns from the battlefield to stake out a new life “out West” on the Great Plains of Oklahoma, where oil has been discovered on land settled and owned by the Native Americans of the Osage Nation. Ernest freely admits—a couple of times—that he “loves money,” and there’s certainly plenty of it here, bubbling and spewing in geysers from the ground…and making the Osage some of the most fabulously wealthy people on the planet.

And it’s also made a boomtown for carpetbaggers, non-indigenous “white” opportunists like Ernest’s uncle, thirsty for some of that black gold—or all of it. So, what will money-loving Ernest do to get filthy rich, far beyond what he can rake in playing poker or even pulling highway-robbery holdups?

Scorsese is probably best known for his crime sagas—Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Irishman, The Departed. This isn’t a “gangster” movie, as such, but it certainly has the feel of the director’s familiar wheelhouse, with a core group (yes, a gang) of bad men doing bad things. In the Osage Nation, they’re robbing the natives of their wealth by almost every means possible, including murder.

Ernest falls in love and marries an Osage woman, Molly (Lily Gladstone), and then, one by one, all Molly’s sisters and other family members start dying. Who’ll be next? Maybe even Molly? Who blew up that house? Or left that dead body out in the woods? And what’s Ernest got to do with it? As the death toll rises into double digits, J. Edgar Hoover sends a federal agent (Jesse Plemons) from the Bureau of Investigation—which would later become the FBI—to nose around.

Based on the bestselling 2017 novel by David Grann, it’s a complex, complicated tale of systemic racism, white nationalism, greedy imperialism, income disparity, ethnic genocide and a conspiracy of silence and coverup, all folded into a love story that takes a wrenching wrong turn. DiCaprio has rarely been better, playing a scowling, morally compromised yahoo in an oversized Stetson, and Gladstone (who grew up in the Blackfeet Nation) has an almost Mona Lisa-like serenity, anchoring the story with a radiance and grace that will doubtlessly be recognized by the Oscars and other year-end awards. Their chemistry is lusty and palpable.

It’s all massive, majestically moving and monumental, but also intimate, richly detailed and finely tooled, full of authentic “period” touches—and enough violence, including an ad hoc autopsy with a handsaw, to meet minimum requirements for a Martin Scorsese movie.

DeNiro—who, like DiCaprio, is one of Scorsese’s favorite go-to actors—is great, as usual, craftily playing “King” Bill Hale, a dapper Osage benefactor and community builder whose smile masks a much more sinister side. There are dozens of other characters too, many played by authentically indigenous Osage actors, and small-part cameos by musicians Jack White, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn and Jason Isbell, plus Brendon Frasier and John Lithgow.

But appropriately enough, it’s Scorsese, the virtuoso filmmaker who’s crafted yet another cinematic masterpiece of movie storytelling, who gets the last word, quite literally, in a final wrap-up epilogue that show how true crime became entertainment for the masses—like this all-star opus about “big trouble” that the modern-day Osage still refer to as their nation’s Reign of Terror.

—Neil Pond

Tagged , , , ,
Jan 19 2016
Leave a comment
History, Movie Reviews, Movies

Where The Wild Things Are

Leo DiCaprio is an unstoppable force of nature in ‘The Revenant’

The Revenant

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and Domnhall Gleason

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

R

Had a tough week? Well, chances are your tales of woe won’t stack up very high against Hugh Glass, the 19th century American frontiersman portrayed by Leo DiCaprio in The Reverent. In the course of this rip-roaring winter wilderness tale, Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear, buried alive, attacked by Indians, swept into the rapids of a freezing river and chased—atop his galloping horse—off a high cliff.

“I ain’t afraid to die anymore,” he says at one point. “I done it already.”

Glass eats birds, raw fish, bison guts and moose marrow, and de-bowels an animal carcass to crawl inside, naked, for a cold night’s sleep.

DiCaprio’s already received a 2016 Golden Globe award and a Critics’ Choice acting prize for his visceral, punishingly physical performance, and The Revenant took other top Golden Globes for its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and for best motion picture drama. Now it’s headed for the Oscars in late February, and buzz is building about how this year and this movie could be the one to finally net Leo his first Academy Award.

Based on a 2002 novel by Michael Punke, The Revenant is a gritty, brutal tale of tragedy, betrayal, survival, endurance, violence and vengeance. (Its title means someone who has returned, especially from the dead.) It begins as Glass, an experienced wilderness guide, and the hunting expedition he’s been hired to lead are ambushed by Arikara Indians somewhere near what is modern-day South Dakota. In a magnificent, sweeping sequence that’s like Saving Private Ryan only with bows and arrows, most of the party is mowed down in mud by a river; Glass and several others escape, including his young, half-Indian son.

Tom Hardy (right) and Will Poulter

And troubles are just beginning—especially for Glass. In one of the film’s most harrowing sequences, a bear mauls him almost to death when he comes between her and her cubs. He gets no sympathy from the vicious, greedy Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who considers Glass dead weight and thinks they’d all be better off if he was put out of his misery.

Fitzgerald also doesn’t care very much, either, for Glass’ son, whose mother—Glass’ Pawnee wife—was killed in a raid by American cavalrymen.

Fitzgerald’s dastardly deed sets the rest of the movie in motion, and director Iñárritu—who last year won acclaim and awards for Birdman—makes the stark, inhospitable desolation of the frontier (much of the filming was done in Alberta, British Columbia) look stunning, lyrical and often beautiful as Glass claws his way back to “civilization,” like an unstoppable force of nature, seeking the man who robbed him of the only thing he had left.

This is a raw, richly elemental movie. The screen swells with earth, air, sky and water. You don’t just watch it, you feel it—the cold, the wet, the pain, and the primal emotions that drive the characters. At times you almost lose DiCaprio beneath his gnarly beard and matted hair, and there are long stretches where the only sounds are grunts, growls, whoops or howls. Trees figure prominently into symbolism and hallucinogenic dream sequences. There’s a strong underlying message about America’s indigenous peoples, their mistreatment and the exploitation of America’s resources.

It’s strong stuff, and won’t be everyone’s cup of frontier stew. But if you’d like a reminder of just how “wild” the western wilderness really was—just how much will, resources and resolve it took to survive in it—The Revenant serves up a spectacularly jarring, frequently jolting dose.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

Tagged , , , , , , , ,